1. Technical Field of the Invention
The principles of the present invention are generally directed to an asset management system, and, more specifically, but not by way of limitation, to a vehicle control system and method using a wireless architecture to monitor, control, and communicate with wireless devices associated with the assets.
2. Description of Related Art
The main assets of a business organization include buildings, equipment, people, money and data. Data assets are acquired, used, and maintained in the same manner as any other asset, and might include information regarding the other assets. Such assets can be mobile or fixed, tangible or intangible assets. Fixed assets may include equipment (e.g., manufacturing equipment), buildings, and fixtures. Mobile assets may include battery-powered or unpowered machines, such as forklifts, cars, boats, airplanes, loading equipment, railroad cars, and even small parcels, containers, letters, and even people. It should be understood that fixed and mobile assets may be personal, commercial, and/or military assets. Businesses must “manage” such assets to accomplish their business purposes.
The management of such assets includes financial, accounting, marketing, and regulatory issues, to name a few, related to the use of such assets for a particular business. Asset management systems facilitate the use of such assets for directing or carrying on such business and, as such, are evaluated in the context of a specific business. For example, package delivery companies are often interested in determining the location of its fleet of trucks so that the package delivery company may easily determine the time of arrival of the trucks. Car rental companies, too, are interested in determining exact locations of their vehicles for inventory purposes. Still yet, warehousing companies are interested in determining locations of particular mobile assets, such as forklifts and containers. Additionally, companies that utilize mobile assets, such as forklifts, are interested in providing access control to the mobile assets so that only those employees authorized to utilize the mobile assets may do so. Thus, asset management systems utilize different databases depending on the nature of the business and industry, which define the data elements for each database. Regardless of the variety of databases, asset management systems require robust communications systems to ensure that all of the data defined by the business is created, stored, processed and updated according to the mandates and specifications of that business.
Wireless communications systems have permeated all aspects of asset management systems and have become a prevalent tool in a variety of consumer and industrial applications worldwide. Such wireless communications systems include mobile telephones, satellite television, citizen-band radios, remote computer networking, wireless local area networks (LANs), and remote wireless devices. Typically, wireless communications systems, including those for asset management systems, include a central computing system coupled with a wireless infrastructure that communicates with multiple wireless devices associated with specific assets, i.e., an asset communicator. Conventional design methodology for the wireless communications systems requires that the asset communicator have an active communication link through the wireless infrastructure to the central computing system in order to operate and perform functions associated with the asset management system. In other words, without the communication links between the asset communicator, wireless infrastructure, and the central computing system, the asset communicator is either inoperative or not fully operative. Moreover, if either (i) the communication link between the central computing system and wireless infrastructure or (ii) the link between the wireless infrastructure and the asset communicator is not operating properly, many features of the asset communicator become inoperative. A useful asset management system must continue to manipulate the data as described above regardless of the loss or intermittent operation of the communication links and, therefore, requires a wireless communication architecture that facilitates the manipulation of this data. For example, an asset management system for vehicles might include access control data for authorized operators. However, as previously discussed, conventional communications systems utilized for asset management purposes require a communication link be established between the asset communicator and the central computing system. Hence, the asset management system must utilize a wireless communication architecture that is not fully dependent upon instantaneous or active communication between the central computer and the asset communicators.
As indicated above, asset management systems and their associated wireless communications systems are developed and operated in the context of a specific business to resolve specific business problems. Continuing with the example of a mobile asset or vehicle (e.g. a forklift) and an asset communicator attached to the vehicle that processes access control for the vehicle, a manager of a fleet of vehicles is generally interested in assuring that the vehicles are operated by a group of employees having the approval to do so at certain times of the day and on certain days of the week to generate a list of “approved operators” that have access to a vehicle at a specific time. Thus, the asset management system includes a database of the approved operators that is checked when the operator logs in and starts the vehicle. Because conventional wireless communications systems rely on the communication link between the asset communicator and the central computing system, the database of the approved operators is maintained at the central computing system and accessed in the event of a login request to verify and grant access by the operator.
In the case of tracking vehicles, the business goal is to determine not only the precise location of the vehicle, but also the route that the vehicle traveled to reach a particular location. Utilizing asset communicators that require an active link between the mobile wireless device and the central computing system becomes problematic for these and other particular business issues due to frequent or infrequent failures of any link between the asset communicator and the central computing system. Because of the communication link failures, essential location data for the assets is lost. Additionally, utilizing a conventional communications system, tracking the traveled route of the asset requires that the asset communicates with the wireless infrastructure at a relatively high frequency so that the central computer system can determine location and path traveled of the asset. This technique of determining position and path traveled, however, presents a significant limitation in terms of system bandwidth and computing capacity. In the case of the asset communicator having global positioning system (GPS) capability, the transmission of position from the asset communicator is still problematic for system bandwidth and, potentially, communication fee-related reasons. If, for example, a communications system utilizes a GPS and cellular combination solution, the cost of continuous communication updates includes a cellular telephone call for each location update.
One reason for the high frequency of transmission is due to conventional asset management systems utilizing “dumb” terminals (i.e., asset communicators) that communicate information with the wireless infrastructure and require that the central computing system perform computational duties as the “dumb” terminal does not have decision making capability. Utilizing a “dumb” terminal becomes even more problematic in that if many assets reside in a small area, the communication bandwidth between the mobile wireless devices and the wireless infrastructure is degraded to the point that the business problems, such as access control and position tracking, are simply incapable of truly being solved.